


the garden of eden

by relationshipcrimes



Series: when you're on the last lap of mario kart and the music gets really fast [2]
Category: Persona 5
Genre: But at least it's romantic!!, Cheating, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Manipulation, Extremely brief sexual reference, M/M, Maybe suicide attempt, Mental Health Issues, Sad with a Happy Ending that is also a Bad Ending, Self-Harm, Specifically Akira cheats on Goro, Unhealthy Relationships, self-harm ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:48:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26278192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/relationshipcrimes/pseuds/relationshipcrimes
Summary: Ten years after Akira kisses Goro for the first time, Goro deals with the aftermath of finding out Akira has been cheating on him.
Relationships: Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira
Series: when you're on the last lap of mario kart and the music gets really fast [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1856380
Comments: 63
Kudos: 361
Collections: 21 plus akeshuake server events





	the garden of eden

**Author's Note:**

> this fic was conceived as an idea in the problematique channel of the 21+ akeshuake server and posted for the 21+ server minibang event. credit to specifically: [guroakechi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/guroakechi/pseuds/guroakechi), [blazhy](https://blazhydoodles.tumblr.com/), and [@ethyxx](https://twitter.com/ethyxxx%E2%80%9D) for the OG conversation that spawned this creature. especially big thank you to ethyxx for her amazing beta read/comments and for babysitting my dumb ass. 
> 
> alas, it has become dramatically different from what we originally discussed in the server channels, but i hope you enjoy it anyway lol. if there’s anyone i forgot to credit please just let me know!

Even a year after they’ve begun living together, Goro wants to throw up at how tenderly Akira touches the bullet scar from the engine room. The wound is barely noticeable from the front, but along the back, his skin obviously burst like a water balloon in a spray of blood and bone, and barely knitted itself back together with scar tissue when Goro dragged himself out of the Palace. It looks violent even now. Sometimes Goro regrets getting out of the engine room just because it’s so ugly.

Akira Kurusu, master of showing as many emotions as a closed window shutter, emanates misery on February 2nd and December 1st, like the very thought of Goro dying became a little more real on those days. Goro catches him sneaking glances when Goro showers, or when he changes clothes, like they were back in a high school boys’ locker room instead of co-leasing an apartment. Once, Goro wakes up in the middle of the night to Akira’s fingers tracing the hardened scar web through the back of Goro’s shoulder blades—the sort of useless touch you run over something you can’t fix but can’t let go of. An inane sentimentality. A useless but inescapable sort of love that made you do stupid things like touch someone gently when they weren’t even awake to feel it.

Goro wears a shirt to bed, after that. He refuses to let Akira fuck him from behind. He begins sleeping on his back.

The next time Goro wears a shirt to bed, Akira says, “Does the scar hurt?”

Goro looks at him oddly. “No?”

“Do you not like it?”

 _Like_ it? That’d be like asking if Goro liked the air around him, or the taste of water. “It’s not pretty, if that’s what you mean.”

“You treat it like it’s something you have to hide.”

“Of course it’s not,” Goro had said brusquely, but he also knows it’s too late. Of course Akira noticed when Goro wouldn’t let him touch the bullet wound. It’s not like Goro refuses him anything else.

Akira looks away, in the way Goro is learning means Akira is still watching him out of his peripheral vision. “I don’t mean to bring it up if you don’t want to talk about it.”

Goro hates that. He didn’t ask for the sort of kindness that makes Akira pull his punches just because they’re together. If anything, Goro thinks that his boyfriend should be the one person most entitled to hit him where it hurts. Does Akira think it’s love to tell white lies? Has Akira, the one person Goro thought would never look down on him, become someone who thinks pity is a form of care?

“If it bothers you, say something,” says Goro archly. Sometimes he can’t fucking stand Akira’s silences.

“It doesn’t bother me that much,” says Akira, which honestly makes Goro want to strangle him. Has he gone and handed his heart over to a coward? Why won’t Akira tell him the truth?

Goro’s fingers curl. He bites his tongue, literally, wondering if he can make it bleed. But Akira doesn’t say anything, and Goro decides he isn’t going to go to sleep now, and instead he’s going to go to the kitchen and down two cups of coffee five minutes before he’s supposed to be asleep.

It takes another ten minutes for Akira to come out to the kitchen and say, “You’re mad at me.”

Goro puts his cup down hard. “ _No_ ,” says Goro viciously. “What makes you say that.”

Something in Akira’s face looks a little resigned, then, and Goro regrets it instantly. Once upon a time, he’d thought that Akira had been so special to him because he could show Akira his true face; now he wonders if his true heart is too ugly for even a person like Akira. Maybe their relationship will divide into two halves, like how Goro has gone about barricading himself away from the rest of the world: Goro’s face for what Akira wants to see, and Goro’s true self, alone to wither away in the dark where it deserves.

Goro makes himself breathe. “Sorry,” he says, but it comes out so sharp that it sounds insincere even to himself when he’d done everything he could just to say the word. “Just tell me the truth, Akira.”

In retrospect, Goro can see how Akira folds at the perfect times to make it seem like he’d never had any problem with it in the first place. Akira comes to sit by him at the kitchen table, curling around Goro, their shoulders and thighs touching to draw as close as they can. His hands rest by Goro’s, and after a second, Goro lets go of the cup to hold him back.

“I just think it’s weird that you seem ashamed of it,” says Akira easily, like it’d never been anything he’d refused to talk about in the first place. Slick as shadows, even now. “You don’t ever seem ashamed about anything else.”

“I’m not ashamed of it. It’s just a scar. That’s just what happens when skin is damaged.”

Akira smiles at that, like Goro said something funny. Goro likes it when Akira seems fond of him even as something sour and uneasy slithers in his gut, because it wasn’t supposed to be a joke. “Do you think it’s ugly or something? Is that why you hide it?”

The scar is too low to miss anything vital, evenly through the shoulder blade and the heart muscle. Goro isn’t sure if he should count himself lucky that he doesn’t remember the moment he got it. It must have hurt. It must have been a blessing, to forget something like your father’s cognition of you aiming your own gun at you and punching a hole through your shoulder. But mostly it just feels like he’s missing a vital piece of himself, like when an amnesiac wakes up in the movies and can’t remember his own name, the first and most obvious signifier of who you are.

“It just raises a lot of questions,” says Goro shortly. “I don’t need strangers at the bathhouse asking about the time I died.”

Akira goes still. His face is unreadable in the dark. “You died?”

“Look at an anatomy textbook, Akira. The scar is right over the heart. Anyone would have questions about why I’m still walking around and not six feet under.”

“You were shot in the _heart_?” Akira repeats, like it physically hurts him just to think about it. Goro doesn’t think he’s ever been paid such a high compliment as someone being sad at the very thought of him dying.

“Shocking to discover that I have a heart?” Goro laughs lightly.

But Akira still looks so wounded that Goro can’t help but lean over and kiss him on the head, right in the middle of his freshly-washed curls. “Why do you think I care about my scar? Maybe I’m just vain and afraid you’ll dump me because I don’t have flawless skin anymore.”

Akira gives him a dry look to match Goro’s dry tone. “It’s a sign that you lived. It’s beautiful.”

“It’s just a scar, Akira. All it means is that I wasn’t supposed to survive,” says Goro.

“Fuck that,” says Akira. Goro laughs quietly. “Says who?”

Goro doesn’t have the heart to tell him that _Goro_ says so. He’d been waiting for Akira to kill him from the first time they met. He’d craved Akira’s hands around his neck, his gun against his head, from that first duel in Mementos. He’d known he wasn’t going to come out alive the second he cast Call of Chaos. He’d known that he wouldn’t survive his father the second he signed Shido’s contract. He was supposed to go out in a blaze of fury, like a star in a state of supernova. An unstable chemical reaction unable to deny its own nature any longer.

Every day Goro’s lived after the engine room has been Akira’s fault. Instead of answering, Goro kisses him quietly in the dark kitchen. He never considers that Akira’s question hadn’t been rhetorical.

*

The next day, he crawls through the internet for pictures of Akira’s favorite flowers: Red camellias, which bloom in winter. Pink, despite their name. Hailed from China but have since gone extinct in the place of their own birth. When the petals fall off the dying flower, the calyx falls away with it. Some say it represents the joining of two lovers so devoted to each other they would remain together in death.

He takes the flower pictures to a tattoo artist. “Tattoo two of them here,” he says, gesturing to the hard, webbed scar tissue. “I want it to bloom from the center. Is that doable with the scarring?”

The artist scratches her chin, but doesn’t ask where he got the scar. She probably thinks he’s ex-yakuza. “Yeah, it’s doable. I’ll make it happen, don’t worry. I’ll get that scar looking beautiful in no time.”

“I’ve been told,” Goro says, “that it’s already beautiful because it means that I’m alive.”

If Akira says so, then Goro will believe him. Still, the tattoo artist gives him a knowing look. Goro smirks without humor.

“Make it gorgeous,” he tells her with the apathy of a nonbeliever. _Make it true_.

*

Akira stops touching the scar after that.

*

Anyway, about eight years later, Goro unlocks Akira’s phone to finds half a dozen of Akira’s nudes sent to a complete stranger, along with nine months worth of flirty messages, fairly graphic sexting, and arrangements to meet up when and where Goro won’t see or notice, so. Funny how that worked out.

*

Placid, steady as a finger on the trigger, Goro parks his car in front of a Souji Seta’s veterinary clinic and cranks the driver’s seat back to wait. The cute thing is, Goro’s sitting in front of his boyfriend’s secret lovers’ workplace with one steel hammer, a knife, a box of plastic gloves and trash bags, and two industrial-sized bottles of lye in his backseat, mentally rifling through the best places to dispose of a body—and for some reason, he feels like he can breathe for the first time in years. He doesn’t even feel anything when he ignores Akira’s text. Half an hour later, he ignores Akira’s five calls and three voicemails. He’d forgotten how easy it is to ignore the insignificant when you’ve got a man you need to kill. He’d forgotten how the taste of blood in your teeth washes out regret, sorrow, and even fear.

Goro is polished clean. He is a weapon back where he belongs. This is the sort of thing he was made for, in the end. It was ridiculous to ever pretend that his very nature isn’t to ruin things. Why had he ever tried to change it?

Souji Seta, owner of _three_ separate social media accounts dedicated to cat photos (and sometimes rats, for some reason), happens to be a newly-established vet on the far side of Tokyo, and it gratifies Goro to know that he’d hate this motherfucker whether or not he’d fucked his boyfriend. Vet clinics are an insane invention born of an exploitable weakness humans have for their objectively-useless and ridiculously overpriced pets. It’s deranged to shell out hundreds of thousands of yen—sometimes millions—to save a four-legged creature that doesn’t even know not to piss in the house; and yet here they all are, with a decent industry dedicated to veterinary science and the education of new vets, all over creatures that go around eating junk that will kill them and accidentally drowning themselves out of stupidity.

If Goro were a broken pet, he’d rather just be put down. He has no interest in being a braindead dog on a wheelchair without enough sense not to drool just for the so-called benefit of living out a few more days. Not that he’d rather die, but the very idea of being so useless and pitiable that he deserves saving—yeah, he’d rather die.

When Akira calls for the seventh time, Goro turns his phone off. Under his shirt, the camellia’s petals bloom against his back when his muscles shift.

Seta comes out exactly when Goro’s illegal snooping into his work shifts told him he would. Seta… isn’t anything like what Goro had expected; he’s bundled in shades of grey, white, and black to match his steely hair, like a city-slick winter skyscraper had manifested into a human being. (Actually, that’s not so surprising. Akira always had a distinctly country-bumpkin taste for metropolitans.) Seta looks utterly untouchable, in the way that Akira used to, back in high school, but Goro knows well enough that Akira bleeds; his mouth waters at the idea of seeing Seta painted red.

But instead of walking to his car or the subway, Seta goes around the back of the building, out of sight of passersby. Goro gets out immediately. This will be easy, if Seta’s willingly going someplace with no eyewitnesses. Maybe Goro will just kill him there and damn the consequences. He takes the hammer with him.

“Do you want me to come over there?” asks Seta’s voice when Goro gets closer. There’s a silence; when Goro leans around the corner, Seta’s frowning at his own feet, his phone at his ear. “No,” says Seta at last. “But I think you need to calm down. He’s a grown adult.”

Another silence. Goro will have to wait for him to get off the phone to avoid witnesses.

“I know that,” says Seta. “But none of that is _your_ responsibility. I know it’s painful when someone you love is struggling or refuses to seek professional help, but that doesn’t mean that you have to—I’m not. Alright. You don’t have to shout. Fine, you’re not shouting.”

He even reassures other people like Akira does. It’s the exact quiet, measured voice of someone being the calm rock in the middle of the storm for someone else to lean on. How narcissistic, that Akira went and picked someone so like himself.

It’s a long moment before Seta says, “I know I’m biased. But I think I’m biased because I love you, so at least I’m biased in your favor. I think you’ve sunk ten years of your life into hoping Akechi will figure his shit out. And it hasn’t happened, and I don’t think you should feel guilty if you have to say, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’”

Another pause.

“It’s just what I think. Maybe I don’t know anything because I’m not involved, but I think that also means I have a new perspective. All I can say is that from where I’m standing, you’ve done more than everything you possibly could, Akira. And it doesn’t sound like he’s even a particularly nice person, anyway. Or grateful for how much you’ve stood by him.”

Another pause.

“You’re not responsible for what Akechi does in the first place,” says Seta. His voice is flat and hard like a steel blade. “I get that you want to help, but you can’t help someone who doesn’t want help, or doesn’t want to figure his shit out.” Pause. “No, I _don’t_ think you know that.”

Silence.

“That’s a little bit of a low blow,” says Seta mildly.

Silence.

“What happened with Yosuke doesn’t make me biased.”

Silence.

“I know.”

Silence.

“I know that. But it’s not a weakness to let other people carry the burden for you sometimes.”

Suddenly, Seta laughs. “Yeah, but if I was actually your therapist, I wouldn’t be able to suck your dick for legal reasons.”

Another silence. Seta hides his smile in his hand. “ _I’m_ the one who literally cried on you on our first date.”

Another silence. Seta makes a fond noise.

“Okay. I will. You too, okay? I’ll be on the subway, but call me if Akechi calls you back.” A pause. “Alright. I’ll wait for you. Love you.”

When Seta walks out of the alleyway, he goes right past Goro without seeing him. For a second, Seta stands on the sidewalk, the back of his head open and exposed as Goro’s fingers clench around the hammer handle.

Goro’s mother used to talk about chance and misfortune. Bad luck was something you attracted on accident from the world around you, like dust, or ants. Shido liked to talk about destiny, and the ensured fate that bound him to glory and the masses to servitude.

Science favors Goro’s mother, and her theory of happenstance. According to the statistics, one in three people will experience their partner cheating on them. (Same-sex partners may or may not be included in this data set.) So if, perhaps, Goro were an uninvolved third party, he would tell himself that it’s not like being cheated on is _uncommon_ , or that it has anything necessarily to do with Goro specifically.

But Goro is not an uninvolved third party.

He is not a statistician, or a scientist, or his mother. He has not believed in fairy tales since he was ten. There isn't going to be any _It was just a mistake_ or _I still love you, he's nothing to me_ or _It's not you, it's me_. There isn’t going to be an explanation or an excuse. _It was a bad decision. I was drunk one night, and he picked me up._ There isn’t going to be a platitude. _I never meant for it to get this far_.

The news story spun a story about a noble politician gone wrong, but there was no tragic mistake to the way Shido died alone in jail. Shido’s entire conspiracy was some kind of genetic destiny. As surely as Shido grew up to be tall and light-skinned, Shido grew his conspiracy like an animal grows a thick fur coat to insulate itself, hardwired into him by his endless paranoia and pride. His destiny was entirely of his own making, and yet entirely pre-written by his own innate nature, and there was no reason why he did what he did beyond the fact that he was an intrinsically rotten man, who warped everything around him to a great, bloated, corrupt mass of ugly co-conspirators that eventually fed him to the tabloids to save themselves.

Goro’s mother was like that, too. She didn’t get pregnant by chance; she got pregnant because she was trusting and naïve. She didn’t carry Goro to term by chance; she gave birth to him because she didn’t really believe her own family would leave her to die. She did not die by chance. She died because of who she was.

Goro’s mother died because she was an overflow of long, spider-lily arms emerging from the pillows and sheets full of body odor and alcohol. He was small enough at the time that adult human hands were the size of his head. Bones emerging from sallow finger skin, fingers emerging from cracked white palms, palms emerging from the awkward, gangly angles of wrists and elbows that bent unnaturally under the weight of her dead arm. Her mattress had eaten her. She had lain in it for months, marinating in her misery, in the stink of her own filth and hopes and dreams that Goro hadn’t understood, because he hadn’t yet learned to want anything but warm food and a place to sleep and his mother’s love and the approval of his peers. What did Goro understand about a college student on a scholarship, who really thought she could be the top of the world if she just worked hard, who didn’t speak to her parents much but didn’t want to let them down, who wanted to like herself and thought that if she just did this one last political science internship then she could finally forgive herself for her middling grades and plain face? Goro grew up in that room, slept on that bed, ate cheap rice soaked in those miseries. He had always been able to feel how the very walls grew bloated and wet with some black fungus from inside his mother’s heart, how the very reality of the world around him sagged and bent with its weight and its stink. He breathed it into his lungs from the moment he was born. He never understood it. He still does not understand it. But he does not need to understand to know that his mother’s waterlogged apartment and swollen mattress finally grew fat with some unstoppable loneliness inside her and, one night, finally swallowed her whole.

On the sidewalk, in the evening winter sun, Goro is staring down the back of Akira’s lover’s head. Goro is holding a hammer, ready to murder a man in broad daylight on a Tokyo street, because of who he is. He is looking at Akira’s betrayals because of who he is. He is looking at Seta, this perfect man who walked right out of a class on cognitive-behavioral therapy, because this is who Akira needed because of who Goro is.

Goro doesn’t move. Seta looks back and forth to figure out if he can cross the street, and then finally turns right and walks away.

*

The ride home is silent. Goro parks the car back in the apartment garage at almost eleven at night. Turns it off. Leans back and looks over at the plastic bags full of murder supplies he’d collected in his backseat.

For the first time, he wants to ask someone: _What should I do? What_ can _I do? Is there anything to_ be _done about your boyfriend who wished you back to life ten years ago now cheating on you with a guy who runs a cat Instagram?_ But when he pulls out his phone to text someone, the only person in his text messaging app that he really talks to is, of course, Akira. He hadn’t thought he’d need anyone else if there wasn’t anyone else worth living for.

Also, he’s still forgotten to get takeout.

*

Their apartment smells like a greenhouse and a coffee shop mixed into one. Even from the foyer, the hallway to the sitting room and kitchen is clogged with flowers: yellow lilies, orange plumerias, long draping leaves of something Goro never cared to memorize, the rim of the pots studded with mini-planters full of succulents. Coffee drifts from the kitchen at all hours. The scent mixes with the sickly sugar of flowers in bloom and the rotting compost, beauty and decomposition bound together with the high note of caffeine overdose.

The apartment is really so full of Akira’s little hobbies that anything Goro owns is inevitably swallowed up into the dirt, like a body into a grave. “I’m home,” Goro announces without expression, and puts the car keys in the key bowl.

“Goro?!” There’s a thud of Akira falling out of bed in the bedroom, then Akira nearly falls out of the bedroom, too, eyes nearly round with how wide they are. “Holy shit, Goro, I was this close to calling Futaba to find you—did you go out in the middle of winter with only one jacket?”

A jacket Goro isn’t even wearing, because he forgot to put it on. The jacket is clutched in one hand; in the other hand is a double-plastic-bagged purchase of materials. _Don’t look at the lye I was going to use to dissolve your secret lover’s body_ , Goro thinks inanely.

 _I think you’ve sunk ten years of your life into hoping Akechi will figure his shit out_ , Seta had said.

“—are you okay?” Akira is saying.

“Why wouldn’t I be,” Goro says, realizing belatedly he’s been standing in the doorway looking at nothing in particular for a whole minute.

“Goro, you said you were going to get takeout _six hours_ ago; you literally just—disappeared; I thought you were gone for good or something or…”

Akira visibly balks at the end of his own sentence.

“Or what,” Goro asks.

“You couldn’t have texted?” Akira says. “Even just _one_ text to say, hey, Akira, I’m fine?”

“Why do you care?”

Akira looks at him like he’s insane. “What part of _being your boyfriend_ makes you think that I don’t care?”

Now that’s a little bit funny, actually, and Goro can’t help his smile. “Goro?” asks Akira, sounding almost frightened. “What’s going on?”

They’re falling into the old patterns again: Goro storms off to the kitchen in the middle of the night, and Akira chases after him to sit beside him in the dark. Goro wakes up haunted by blood on his hands, he rolls over, tells Akira about it, and Akira nods and listens and holds him close. Goro ignores a coworker for a week after a minor slight until she breaks down from stress, and Akira nods and listens and tells him that he probably did fuck up. Goro refuses to attend Okumura’s birthday party until Akira stops asking, and until Goro feels guilty, and he tells Akira that he has no interest in a rich brat who never addressed how half of her current employees commissioned hits from Goro ten years ago, and Akira nods and listens and shuts his mouth, so that Goro’s secrets can die with him.

Maybe it’s because Akira learned all those years ago, on one February night, that if Akira doesn’t go after him, Goro really will just keep walking. And if Akira doesn’t ask and listen, Goro doesn’t have anyone else to tell.

Akira will listen to whatever it is that Goro has to tell him because Akira doesn’t have a choice.

“Nothing,” says Goro instead. “I needed to take a walk.”

“For six hours? In the dark? By yourself?”

Part of Goro wants to punch him for assuming that Goro doesn’t have any friends to see. Part of him wants to punch himself because Akira assumed rightly. “Don’t worry about it,” he says shortly, and then: “I forgot dinner, by the way.” Not that it matters to Akira, actually, since cooking is another one of Akira’s hobbies, and the kitchen is choked with his ten million cast iron pans and fancy spoons, except that Akira stopped cooking for them both about—about a year ago, he supposes. Long before Akira met Seta, Akira couldn't bear to be near him even if it involved something he enjoyed doing anyway. “We have ramen in the pantry so you don’t have to cook,” Goro says, unsure of why he’s offering this little mercy to the person who’s cheated and lied to him for months on end, and then he walks right past him and shoves the hammer and knives and plastic gloves and bottle of lye in the darkest part of their closet, where Akira never bothers to look anymore.

*

Akira doesn’t call Seta that night, like he promised him on the phone. Or maybe he does, because at one point Akira takes his phone with him to the bathroom for nearly half an hour, while Goro lets the TV run a reality show he doesn’t care about and, as if on autopilot, writes another batch of emails. _I hope this email finds you well_ , Goro types, and then starts laughing at the mundanity of it. The veneer of normalcy stretched thin over the bitter and ugly truth is familiar. Even comfortable.

Akira pokes his head back out of the bathroom, looking almost terrified to see Goro sitting on the couch, laptop askew on his thighs, laughing wildly at the muted TV. “Goro?” Akira says worriedly. “Is something… funny…?”

Yes, actually; Goro can’t believe that Akira got him so good that Goro really believed his garbage about _I love you_ and _I want to see your true self_ and _I like you just the way you are_. His whole chest feels light like he’s swallowed a bag of fluff. “Nothing,” says Goro, waving his hand, “I’m just—I’m just in a good mood. I’m happy.”

Akira just looks even more worried at that. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” says Goro, still giggling, and he isn’t even lying. He’s glad. For the first time in years, everything feels right. He goes through his evening routine and crawls into bed insulated in the warm glow that Akira, at this very moment, is in love with some other stranger. Their shared bed has never felt so warm and comfortable as it does now knowing that Akira wishes he were somewhere else.

At three in the morning, when Goro is sure that Akira is asleep, Goro sits up and pulls Akira’s phone from its charger. He unlocks it with the password that Akira doesn’t know Goro knows and scrolls through the text messages: The worried pillow talk from Seta, the platitudes, the _I love yous_ and _I wish you were here_ and Akira’s familiar, bratty idea of flirting that Akira used to send to Goro years ago.

Timestamped at 9 PM:

 **Akira** : He’s done stuff like that before  
**Akira** : Like he just disappeared for years once and let me think he was dead  
**Akira** : And another time I think he just… threw his life away  
**Akira** : Not like it was an official attempt or something but he didn’t seem to care if he died   
**Akira** : And I tried to talk to him about it before but he just gets angry  
**SS** : Hmm.  
**SS** : My professional opinion is “yikes.”  
**Akira** : Haha  
**Akira** : I thought that he was back to stay when we started dating  
**Akira** : But it always feels like he’s still on the verge of leaving  
**Akira** : Sometimes I get so fucking tired of his shit I just wish he would

 _So this is the truth_ , Goro thinks. He doesn’t know why he ever let Akira convince him otherwise. Goro leans his head back against the mattress, smiling to himself, basking in satisfaction blooming in his chest. He thinks he’s maybe never been happier than he is in this moment. In the dark, he curls around Akira’s phone, and holds it close to his chest like a favorite bedtime story.

*

The next morning is the best Goro has ever had. Goro wakes up an hour before his alarm goes off and watches the sun rise on a Saturday that he’ll have to work through, and the whole world seems brighter. He is in bed with his lover who does not love him. Might even hate him. Goro makes a cup of Akira’s cold brew coffee and closes his eyes in the rising sun, humming a song his mother used to sing. 

Akira’s still sleeping in because his shift at the flower shop isn’t until mid-morning, so Goro gets up at around seven and calls his editor, since she never sleeps anyway. Hanazawa picks up on the first ring, her voice clipped sharper than a military sergeant, which is how he knows that she’s already been hard at work for a few hours. “Your piece isn’t due for another eight hours,” she tells him.

“I’m quitting,” he replies.

She says _What?_ like a broken record, as people always seem to do when confronted with reasonable proposals that simply don’t fit their agenda.

“I’m sending you the rough draft,” Goro says, when she’s done stammering and saying words that don’t mean things. “Get someone to finish the article if you really want to run it. I’m done.”

“Wait! What’s this about? There’s laws, you know, you can’t just quit on the spot when we need you still to—”

“I don’t really care,” says Goro, and hangs up. He blocks her number on the spot, and then all his coworkers’ numbers, and then throws his phone on the couch. For the first time in years, the tattoo on his back seems to itch the way it did before it had fully healed. He tries to scratch at it idly as he waits for Akira to wake up.

What a fucking ridiculous thing to deal with, Goro thinks. Your boyfriend who wished you back to life, who loved you when everyone and everything told him not to, who waited for Goro to come back for literal years— _him_ , of _all_ people, cheating on you with someone else.

He wouldn’t have to deal with this if he’d just stayed dead in the engine room. He thinks that about a lot of things: He’d be standing in line for coffee and the barista will give him the wrong order, and he’d think, _I wouldn’t have to deal with this I had died._ Or they’d crawl through a dozen different apartments looking for one that was located in the right place for both Akira’s and Goro’s jobs and he’d think, _I wouldn’t have to deal with this if I had died._ Or Futaba Sakura would flinch whenever he shows up at Akira’s birthday parties, and he’d think, _I wouldn’t have to deal with this I had died._ Or he’d oversleep before work, and he’d think—

—well, that he wouldn’t have to deal with this if Akira hadn’t turned off his fucking alarm.

Everything is Akira’s fault. Even when Goro doesn’t think about it, he always knows that he’s alive because of Akira. If Akira hadn’t wished him back to life. If Akira hadn’t waited years for Goro to come back. If Akira hadn’t begged him for a first date. If Akira had just been mad at him like a rational human being for Goro trying to _kill him_ , instead of trying to fuck him and then put a ring on it. If Akira had just let him fucking go, and if Akira didn’t look like a kicked dog at the very idea of Goro dying. _I wouldn’t have to deal with this if Akira had let me die._

Akira comes out of the bedroom an hour later and grabs a piece of bread for the toaster, and Goro watches him, feeling hopelessly fond. For one of the few times in his life, he’s looking forward to the new day.

*

Akira heads off to work and, in credit to how much he seems to have lost complete and total interest in Goro altogether, doesn’t even ask why Goro isn’t running off to interview a client. Well, it’s not like Goro spends the day idly when Akira is gone; Goro doesn’t know if he knows how not to work. He spends his new day off doing research. He makes lists, even, in an online note app where he’s sure that Akira will not accidentally pick them up, mistaking them for a list of shopping to be done.

Sometime after lunch, which he makes and then lets sit until it grows cold, Goro goes to the apartment bathroom and peels off his shirt. Examines the tattoo on his back in the mirror, framed by Akira’s collection of hair curlers and anti-frizz spray. Akira’s favorite flower tattooed on his very skin, while Akira runs off and fucks some other man.

It itches. No matter how Goro twists, he can’t quite manage to get his nails into it. It’s too squarely in the center of his back, nestled safely around his heart, out of the reach of his prying fingers.

Goro puts “tattoo removal” on the list, and titles the whole thing _Affairs To Finish Before You Leave Your Cheating Piece of Shit of a Boyfriend_.

*

Their first kiss had been Akira’s fault, like everything else: Just so accidentally-on-purpose sitting too close to each other over a book of chess techniques, and in the time it’d taken for Goro to let his guard down for a second, Akira had leaned in close over his shoulder, Goro had looked to his left, and his face was inches from Akira’s eyes. If Goro hadn’t known better, he would have taken Akira’s wide eyes for surprise.

Absolutely not. Goro had known he’d been outplayed while he held the instruction manual on _How To Outplay Your Enemies_ in his hands. The nervous look as Akira’s stare held Goro’s for one second longer than he should have, then the flicker downwards, to Goro’s lips—no, someone like Akira, who’d wished Goro back to life, who’d waited for years for Goro to come back, who’d gone and asked for Goro to visit him every day since he’d found out he was alive—someone like that didn’t make mistakes. They were here by design. It was just a stupid one, because despite everything, Akira was still a naïve idiot besotted with bad decisions and dangerous people. Akira still rotated around the central logic of ruin and rehabilitation. Akira thought that everyone and everything got better over time.

Goro had leaned in, curious to find out what it tasted like to believe in a better future.

Like Akira’s bottom lip, of course—cool skin, a sharp breath in, and surprisingly no flavor at all. Like pressing your lips to glass, trying to taste an image on the other side. Akira immediately cradled Goro’s face like he was something precious, kissed him like Goro was the center of his world, curled around him like the longing hurt to keep inside. And some greedy part of Goro wanted to be loved.

Well, maybe it wasn’t true that Goro was a lovable person, but if Akira loved him, then it wasn’t technically like Akira was lying to him, or that Goro was lying to himself. The two facts could coexist peacefully: Goro was not a person who could be loved, and Akira was just very stupid and in love despite that. Which was… tolerable. The only thing that Goro really could never tolerate was when people lied to him. Such a fucking meaningless waste of time, everyone pretending to like each other and get along and give a damn—it was like being a starving man looking at those realistic plastic food models they have in restaurant windows, unable to stop salivating over what he knows is just a hunk of chemicals and dye. Maddening. Disgusting.

The thing that Goro is mad about now is that Akira didn’t have the nerve to break up with him to his face. What was the point of this whole charade? What was the point of dragging this on, keeping Goro around as second-best to Seta’s love?

As if Goro hadn’t given him more than enough chances to break up with him. Goro used to offer to break up with him on a _daily_ basis—like the time that Akira had said, “I’m going over to Haru’s place,” like he had a million times before: _I’m going to Ryuji’s_ , or _I’m going to Ann’s_ , always with a little hopeful uptick in his voice like he was hoping this would be the time that Goro relented and said, _Okay, I’ll come with you_ , and mean _Yes, Akira, today I will play nicely with your friends and return their phone calls and add their phone numbers to my contacts list and stop shutting down Ann’s every attempt at parlay_. And the memory of that tone of voice was so strong that Goro suddenly, for the first time, had had the urge to actually go through with it. _I’ll do it. I’ll come with you. You won’t have to avoid talking about your own boyfriend when you’re with your friends; you won’t have to avoid talking about Okumura when you come home_. And the urge was so strong that he’d barely noticed that Akira’s voice was absentminded and listless, in a way that told Goro that Akira had long since given up on Goro ever making peace with the entire rest of Akira’s most valued friends.

Goro had missed it. He’d sat around for so long, thinking that Akira would be patient with him forever, that he really had missed his chance.

“We should break up,” Goro had said.

And of course Akira hadn’t taken him up on it, but instead Akira had stopped halfway out the door and said, a little angrily: no, absolutely not, why would you say that? Goro had snapped back, “I’m tired of your fucking pity.”

“Pity?” Akira had repeated in disbelief. Offended that Goro would say such a word. “What part of this seemed like pity to you? What part of—” and he’d glanced at his watch, because he was already late for his little get-together with Okumura and now he was going to be later still because Goro had to throw a tantrum two seconds before Akira went out the door. “No. Look. I have to go. Use your eyes and actually look at what I’m doing for once instead of staying stuck in your own head.”

And then he’d closed the door firmly enough to be Akira’s version of slamming the door, and Goro had gone out to Crossroads, took as many weird drugs as he could get his hands on, and blacked out in Lala’s backroom closet.

When he’d woken up with a killer headache in his own bedroom, Akira’s back turned towards him sullenly, Goro had thought: _That’ll teach you to be in love with someone like me._ And then Akira had turned around with a sober look in his dark liquid eyes, like he was looking at Goro in a coffin rather than in their shared queen-sized bed, and said, “Goro. I didn’t mean it. I wasn’t mad at you.”

“I,” Goro had said, and coughed. He’s almost surprised to find that his voice functions at all after everything he took yesterday.

That wasn’t the usual color of Akira’s liquid black eyes. That was actual liquid, and it was clear, and it was tears sticking to Akira’s eyelashes. “Whatever I said, I’m sorry. If you thought that I don’t love you…”

“I know you love me,” Goro had said raspily, and didn’t add, _That’s a little bit of the problem, actually._

“What the _fuck_ , then,” said Akira. “I almost thought I’d have to take you to the hospital, you know that? Takemi thought you were dead when I brought you in.”

“We should break up, then.”

Akira has rounded on him like he’s going to pin him to the mattress and strangle him to death right there, and Goro could die smothered in his bed like his mother before him. Like their duel in Mementos, Goro fading out in Akira’s arms and drowning in Akira’s eyes, just a handful of years later than Goro thought he would. But better late than never, of course. “ _Stop saying that_ ,” Akira had hissed.

 _Then this is what you deserve_ , Goro had thought. _I don’t know what else you expected_. “You like running off to your other friends a lot for someone who wants to stay together,” Goro has said instead.

“I’m sorry for having friends,” Akira had said sourly.

“You should be,” Goro had replied, just to be nasty.

Akira had stiffened. “What did you think was going to happen after you left?” Goro had asked. Akira turned away.

“I’m not giving up on you,” Akira had said quietly.

Goro had wondered, then, when Akira was going to figure out that this whole miserable experience was only to be expected from loving someone like Goro. Akira had turned back towards him, determination in his eyes, and kissed Goro’s mouth against the pillows. His mouth still tasted like nothing.

*

Goro greets Akira at the door with a kiss, like they’re back in the honeymoon phase, and smiles widely at Akira’s confused expression. He looks almost guilty. A bit off-put, if not disgusted. It makes Goro want to kiss him again, to see if he can make Akira’s face curl into a real sneer of revulsion, but before Goro can try, Akira ducks his head and sidesteps him on the way to the bedroom.

Goro feels like he’s been slapped.

It’s wonderful.

“You’re home early,” Goro says cheerfully.

Akira looks back warily, like Goro had accused him of, perhaps, cheating on him for the last nine months with some fucko whose hair went grey at age thirty. “Mm,” Akira says, as impassable as Joker’s mask. Somehow, even wearing a nondescript black T-shirt and jeans, he seems to retreat into smoke and mirrors before Goro’s very eyes. Just like he used to back in high school, when the reality around him at Shujin High was so awful and intolerable that he had no choice but to try and disappear in plain sight. Akira slides away into the bedroom. Goro watches him go.

Akira spends that night playing an online game with Futaba and Sakamoto and, as always, studiously not mentioning anything about Goro to either of them despite the fact that Goro is sitting right across the room from him. Years of practice have made Akira a pro at letting Futaba and Okumura pretend that he isn’t spending his life with the man who killed their parents. (Or some of his life, at any rate.)

If Akira wanted to pretend he wanted to spend time with Goro, he’s doing a terrible job of it. They make eye contact only twice in the whole night. It’s intolerable. Goro falls asleep exhausted.

His eyes snap open at three in the morning.

His electric watch vibrates against his wrist with a silent alarm. As if possessed, he gets up wired on energy he shouldn’t have and finds Akira dead asleep. Goro reaches over him and unlocks Akira’s phone as casually as he would his own.

At around eleven at night, while Akira was still technically wrapping up the last rounds of online gaming, the conversation with Seta had begun, and lasted until half an hour past midnight. Goro would have been asleep by then.

 **SS** : You can’t even see me for an hour?  
**SS** : After work, maybe?  
**Akira** : I’ve already been staying out after work so much  
**Akira** : Everyone knows that’s a classic cheating thing to do  
**Akira** : It’ll make Goro even more suspicious than he already is  
**SS** : You really think staying away will make him somehow _less_ suspicious?  
**SS** : How long are we supposed to avoid each other?  
**Akira** : Only for a week or so  
**Akira** : Then I’ll come and see you again I promise  
**Akira** : Goro really seems stressed about something  
**SS** : Give him some space?  
**Akira** : He’ll just get worse if I leave him alone for too long  
**SS** : His shitty moods aren’t something that’s your responsibility.  
**Akira** : Lol  
**Akira** : Nothing for it but to suffer through it  
**SS** : Akechi-sama gets you all to himself when you could be spending time with me :(  
**Akira** : Jealous? 💋  
**SS** : Every day, dear  
**Akira** : I’ll make it up to you later ❤️  
**SS** : owo?  
**Akira** : I’ll call you when he’s asleep. Around 1 am-ish  
**SS** : ❤️❤️❤️  
**SS** : I’ll wake up for it  
**SS** : Love you. I miss you already  
**Akira** : I love you too  
**SS** : Are you sure you can’t come visit while he’s with friends?  
**Akira** : He doesn’t really have any  
**Akira** : …Friends  
**SS** : Ah  
**SS** : …Really?  
**Akira** : Yeah  
**SS** : Surely at least one or two? Or an online friend?  
**Akira** : It’s kind of not an exaggeration  
**SS** : Oh.  
**Akira** : He’s not a very friendly person  
**SS** : I suppose you’ve already talked to him about that.  
**Akira** : Haha you’re concerned about my boyfriend’s sanity now?  
**SS** : Oops. Bad habit to stick my nose in other people’s wellness. Haha  
**Akira** : I tried  
**Akira** : It didn’t really go so well  
**Akira** : I thought that it’d get better over time  
**Akira** : Because his teenaged years were really rough  
**Akira** : And he’d come out of it as an adult  
**Akira** : But then he just… didn’t  
**Akira** : It was kind of bad actually  
**Akira** : I know one of my friends tried really hard to reach out to him  
**Akira** : And he pushed her away at every turn  
**Akira** : It kind of hurt her feelings tbh  
**SS** : Hmm.  
**SS** : Therapy?  
**Akira** : He didn’t want to do that either  
**Akira** : I don’t really blame him therapy’s not all it’s cracked up to be  
**Akira** : And I mean  
**Akira** : How far could even a therapist really get when the patient doesn’t want to get better?  
**SS** : Hm.  
**SS** : Not very.  
**Akira** : Isn’t it better that he’s got at least one person rather than no one?  
**SS** : Are you necessarily responsible for him and what happens to him?  
**Akira** : What if you didn’t psychoanalyze me  
**SS** : Oops. Sorry.  
**Akira** : No you’re not  
**SS** : Ah, you got me. Nope! I’m not. :)  
**SS** : It’s not psychoanalyzing anyone  
**SS** : It’s just a question I’d ask any friend.  
**Akira** : You’re weirdly interested in my boyfriend for someone who’s supposed to be _my_ secret affair  
**SS** : owo? Are you… jealous?  
**SS** : Well, I’m also jealous of Akechi-sama.  
**SS** : So I think that calls it even.

Goro reads it over and over. He wishes he could engrave the little pet names and hints of injokes they share on his eyes. He reads the lines again, like a three-line poem he’s determined to wring every drop of meaning from, and just before the sun breaks, Goro relocks the phone, plugs it back in, and crawls back into bed beside Akira as if nothing had happened at all.

*

Goro leaves early the next morning to avoid Akira’s suspicions about his suddenly free schedule and missing work duties. He goes to a nearby coffee shop and lurks over a double shot of espresso as he pulls out his laptop and the desktop client for Line. Not that he couldn’t text, but he wants a keyboard for this conversation.

Firstly, he has to go to his blocklist and unblock Okumura.

 **Akechi** : Here’s the names I remember.  
**Akechi** : [IMG_4098]  
**Akechi** : [IMG_4099]  
**Akechi** : [IMG_5000]  
**Akechi** : [IMG_5001]  
**Akechi** : You’re free to do with them as you wish.  
**Akechi** : You very well could ignore the murderers who still hold high-ranking positions within your company who commissioned hits from me, making you essentially no better than your father.  
**Akechi** : I’m sure you’ll sleep very well at night.  
**Akechi** : He did, too.  
**Okumura** : Good morning, Akechi.  
**Okumura** : We haven’t talked in quite a while, have we.  
**Akechi** : I don’t intend to change that.  
**Akechi** : Goodbye.  
**Okumura** : Akechi… I know that our last conversation didn’t go so well, but I’ve been thinking.  
**Okumura** : I did a background search into the last batch of names you gave me.  
**Okumura** : I see now that you weren’t lying. Many of them did commission murders for business purposes.  
**Okumura** : Often in conjunction with my father.  
**Akechi** : I’m glad to see that my testimony on who did and did not commission me for hits meant so little to you without a second opinion.  
**Okumura** : Many people say many things. Especially in business.  
**Okumura** : I have to fact-check most things nowadays.  
**Okumura** : Which is not to say that you specifically haven’t been terrifically dishonest with us in the past, of course.  
**Okumura** : I won’t lie to you.  
**Akechi** : Good.  
**Okumura** : I just… really think that it’s possible to come to some sort of truce.  
**Okumura** : Please don’t block me again.  
**Akechi** : You’re a very interesting person to reach out to me when I’ve made it so abundantly clear that I want nothing to do with you.  
**Okumura** : Don’t you think you’ve put Akira through enough?  
**Okumura** : Everyone who used to be in the Thieves still keeps in contact with him, but there’s so much that he can’t share with us because every time we try and connect with you, you do something like tell Yusuke that it’s only a matter of time before he ends up like Madarame.  
**Okumura** : Or something equally horrible.  
**Akechi** : You think this is my fault?  
**Okumura** : I know it’s your fault. I’m just informing you.  
**Okumura** : But it’s been a long time. I don’t expect an apology from you, either.  
**Okumura** : And it looks like Akira has no intention of breaking up with you. So neither of us are going to be getting rid of each other any time soon.  
**Okumura** : At the very least, consider Akira’s position in the matter.  
**Akechi** : I don’t think you understand.  
**Akechi** : It’s not that I’m not going to give you an apology.  
**Akechi** : I personally think ridding the world of your father was one of the only things I ever did right.  
**Akechi** : And I hope that as much as you consider me a despicable human being, you know that your father was a thousand times worse.  
**Akechi** : I don’t just have the moral high ground re: your father.  
**Akechi** : Your father worked hundreds of his innocent, unsuspecting, hardworking, earnest employees to literal death when all they were trying to do was provide for their families.  
**Akechi** : Your father’s very existence makes me sleep better at night knowing that his sins outnumber my own by far.  
**Akechi** : And, frankly, I don’t want anything to do with the daughter who inherited his corporation full of murderers built on the deaths of old employees, and doesn’t even have the nerve to fire the men who commissioned assassinations for petty cash.  
**Okumura** : I see.  
**Okumura** : In truth, I don’t blame you for thinking that.  
**Okumura** : I, myself, often cannot bring myself to forgive my father for what he’s done.  
**Okumura** : So it might be true.  
**Okumura** : But I hope you understand that I can’t forgive you for saying such a hurtful thing.  
**Okumura** : I’m tired of putting up with you.  
**Okumura** : Akira deserves someone better. Someone who isn’t so cruel.  
**Akechi** : We all know that, but I’m glad someone’s finally said it.  
**Akechi** : Don’t contact me again.

*

The funny thing is that Goro is pretty sure that Okumura is Akira’s best friend.

 _Pretty sure_ , of course, because Akira never talks about it, and Goro has no idea when or where this occurred, or for how long, or what they do together, which is almost just as funny as Akira’s best friend being the daughter of a man Goro killed. Knowing who your boyfriend spends his free time with seems like the sort of thing you should know, right?

Word spreads fast. Akira comes home not ten minutes after his shift ends, so fast that Goro’s convinced that he left early just to yell at him. “What—” and Akira visibly restrains himself, tones his voice down: “Goro, what did you do?”

“About Okumura, right? I told her the truth.” Goro pauses, mostly for dramatic effect. “By the way, I think I actually quite like her.”

“She cried over the phone from what you said to her,” says Akira. He says it flatly, like he doesn’t even have the willpower to be upset.

“She told me the truth. I told her the truth. Please tell her that I’m thankful for her honesty. It’s more than many other people would do for me.”

Akira’s eyes slide away. He doesn’t say anything to that.

“You have good friends,” Goro tells him, and means it. He’s glad that Akira has someone like Okumura by his side. Someone who knows the value of both truth and kindness is the sort of person that Akira deserves.

*

One down. Three list items to go.

*

In the tarot, “Death” does not usually mean death, but a dramatic or sudden change, so total and complete that it obliterates everything in its path. No real change can occur until the past has been razed clean, after all.

What was it like, when Goro died? What had he been thinking about when he’d stared down the barrel of the gun? Did he feel it when the bullet went through? Did he scream? Was it a good enough substitute, to bleed his hatred out through the chest rather than feel the satisfaction of seeing his father squirm? Was it better than having to put one day in front of the other now that he’s still alive. His father is in jail, and Goro never really got the revenge that he dedicated his every waking moment to, and now he has to wake up every day on this mattress next to Akira and feel normal-people-life chafing his ugly, rotten personality like an ill-fitting shoe—is that supposed to be _better_? In this supposed happy ending, Goro doesn’t suddenly becomes a new person and magically starts to believe in the power of love and friendship. There is no moment of relief as he becomes the person Akira deserves. He just stays bitter and cynical and too mean to be funny, a corrosive acid on Akira’s life, and now there isn’t even a shit person like Shido around who’s worth bringing down with Goro when he burns through the floor.

When he’s being honest with himself, he knows why nobody likes him. He knows why he had to change his personality into the plastic Detective Prince just to avoid being thrown away like gutter trash, because what he is isn’t too far off. He’s a dangerous chemical; if not for careful administration as poison, then destined for biohazard disposal.

Why _wouldn’t_ people despise him? Who could really love something like that?

In some flower languages, red camellias are a gift to a lover, and in other languages, a prayer for a graceful death. It’s the sort of flower Goro would want laid at the grave of his former self. Out of that ugly mess, maybe something good will grow. Maybe someone new will emerge from the grave he left in the engine room. A total and complete rebirth born of total and complete death, a change so absolute that even someone like Goro Akechi can become lovable.

Nowadays, all camellias really mean to Goro is a constantly stream of scratches along his back like it’s alive. He still can’t reach it; he’d get a stick to scratch it, but he doesn’t want the itch gone, he wants the _flower_ gone.

His eyes flicker and land on the knife block.

The phone clicks from the holding ringtone to the bank representative’s voice. Goro informs him he would like to withdraw everything, in cash, to be picked up at the so-and-so branch by four in the afternoon tomorrow, promptly; and then he would like to close his account, thank you. The representative, alarmed, puts him back on hold, which would be annoying except that Goro has a great well of patience lately, now that he has nothing else to do and all the time in the world to finish his affairs.

In the meantime, Goro plays with his empty coffee mug, running his mind over his list like a finger over a knife. The sunset catches the edges of the plumerias. Goro smiles at Akira’s flowers for the first time. Cute, that he never figured out that Akira’s flowers and Goro were the same, when Goro was the one who branded the flower on his back in the first place. Little hobby projects kept neatly in Akira’s apartment for no one’s satisfaction but Akira’s.

*

If Akira wants him to sleep on the couch, Akira doesn’t say so. He doesn’t say anything to Goro, really. He curls up on his side, facing away, and doesn’t move for hours, until he falls asleep still hunched over and silent.

In the middle of the night, Goro steals his own lover’s thoughts secondhand from a stranger he’s never met.

 **Akira** : Please don’t ask me about goro right now  
**Akira** : I’m so sick of him  
**Akira** : Everyone’s always on my ass telling me to leave  
**Akira** : And it’s like. of course they’d say that because they don’t understand even a little bit  
**Akira** : What’ll happen if i do  
**Akira** : I can’t even tell him to knock it off without him turning it into an escalation game  
**Akira** : If I want space he disappears for a week  
**Akira** : If i say one mean thing to him he goes and drinks himself unconscious  
**Akira** : Obviously I don’t want to see how much more inventive he can get  
**Akira** : And I get why he does it and i know he’s struggling and he can’t help it but  
**Akira** : Actually that’s not true. I don’t get why he does it  
**Akira** : Sometimes i think seriously can you please just go to therapy or something  
**Akira** : Why does everything I say or do have to have some sort of terrible awful consequence  
**Akira** : And then he’s like “it’s because you’re not honest with me” no fucking shit i’m not honest with him  
**Akira** : Why would you think i could be  
**Akira** : But at least usually with him it’s in response to something right? So at least i know what it is that caused it  
**Akira** : But this time it’s like it came out of nowhere  
**Akira** : Or maybe he just hates Haru that much  
**Akira** : I don’t know  
**Akira** : I don’t want to talk about him  
**SS** : That was a lot of talking about him when you said you weren’t going to.  
**SS** : Honestly I was just going to send you a picture of my cats.  
**Akira** : That sounds really good right now actually  
**SS** : [IMG_0218]  
**SS** : Guess how many cats are in this box.  
**Akira** : Three  
**SS** : Wrong. Seven.  
**Akira** : Wh  
**Akira** : No  
**Akira** : What  
**SS** : No matter how small the space is. The cat will fit. 😊  
**Akira** : Aren’t you going to ask me to leave him?  
**SS** : Do you want me to?  
**Akira** : Don’t deflect  
**SS** : Hahahaha.  
**SS** : I already gave you my soapbox on how you’re not responsible for what he does.  
**SS** : And it’s not your job to, I don’t know, do everything right to prevent him from doing shit like this.  
**SS** : Again, whatever he’s been going through, it seems to have been going on for much longer than you’ve ever known him.  
**SS** : You’re not single-handedly responsible for making him stabilize.  
**Akira** : Aren’t I  
**SS** : Hmmm.  
**SS** : I want what makes you happy.  
**SS** : But I know that we don’t stay with people just because of love.  
**SS** : It definitely takes way more than love to stay committed to someone.  
**SS** : And love is not a good reason to leave someone either.  
**SS** : But I do want you to be happy.  
**SS** : Are you happy with Akechi-kun?  
**Akira** : Don’t ask me that  
**SS** : Sorry.  
**Akira** : You don’t have to apologize  
**Akira** : It’s… a valid question  
**Akira** : I know I don’t answer that question but it’s nice that someone asks me that  
**SS** : I know that I keep asking because I’m being selfish, though.  
**SS** : Because I’m just being greedy.  
**Akira** : It’s good to want things  
**Akira** : Something that makes you want something more and more, like you’ll never get enough…  
**Akira** : Isn’t it important to have something that you want so much it makes you selfish?  
**SS** : I guess that’s true, too.  
**Akira** : I’m really sorry about what happened with hanamura  
**SS** : Me too.

“Goro…?” Akira’s voice says.

Ice slides down Goro’s spine, but he knows his expression betrays nothing in the dim light of Akira’s phone and the bedroom darkness. Akira’s face looks out towards him from halfway in Goro’s pillow, looking tired and very small. “What are you doing up…?”

Goro just shakes his head. Turns Akira’s phone off and hides it back on their bedside table. He sits back on the bed, leaning over Akira’s face, examining him gently but without touching him at all. Akira’s eyes strain to focus on his face even as Goro looms inches away. “Go back to sleep, Akira.”

And Akira doesn’t even protest, like he hadn’t even wanted to be awake in the first place. His half-asleep eyes slide shut again.

*

For the second time in a few days, Goro is in front of Souji Seta’s vet clinic, where Seta, relatively new in his career, works with several other senior practitioners. This one is also a matter of timing, because he has to catch Seta when he isn’t in the middle of anything, but not so lax that he disappears back to his room. Goro buys snacks. Parks his car on the curbside. He waits for six hours, watching the front room through the glass doors, but Seta is constantly—well, not so much in motion, so much as he is unavailable: Everyone in the waiting room seems to greet him with wide smiles and enthusiasm, and Seta spends what seems like entire hours smiling politely and nodding along to whatever they’re saying.

Eventually, it comes time for Seta’s shift to end. Last chance, unless Goro wants to come here again tomorrow. (He doesn’t. He’s already taking too long as it is.) Goro gets out of his car, dressed in clean browns and whites to look as unassuming and unthreatening as possible, and _just so happens_ to walk into the clinic just as Seta comes out with his travel bag packed to go home.

“Excuse me!” says Goro, with pleasant plastic cheer that’s so familiar on his face from his celebrity days. He knows it looks fake; he wills the smile to look as lifelike as possible, if only for this conversation. This has to be the performance of his life. “Seta, do you remember me?”

Seta doesn’t even look surprised, just a little confused. Obviously, because there’s no way that Seta could remember him. “You saved my cat from an illness a while back,” Goro says, as if trying to jog his memory about an event that does not exist, because Goro does not have a cat.

Seta’s eyebrow twitches, and then his expression clears, so fast Goro almost doesn’t catch it. “Oh, yes, of course I remember you,” he says. “Apologies, I’m better with faces than I am with names, if you could remind me of yours…?”

“Yoshizawa,” says Goro, just to pull the name out of a hat.

“Yoshizawa,” says Seta warmly, like the name had been on the tip of his tongue and he’s genuinely putting the name to a face he remembers. “I’m so glad to see you again.”

Goro finds himself liking this man and his impeccable lies immensely. He’s a specific flavor of two-faced son of a bitch that Goro had found himself missing from the conspiracy days. “I was in this part of the city, and I thought I’d drop by. I just wanted to thank you for the good you’ve done.”

“I’m happy to be of service. How’s your cat nowadays?”

“Ah,” says Goro. “Unfortunately, I’m going to be leaving the city soon. I don’t think I can take him with me.”

Seta’s face is a little sad, a little sympathetic now. It’s so impressive; it’s not like watching an animatronic customer service agent at all; it’s nothing like the plastic emotion of a celebrity or Detective Prince. If he’s faking anything now, Goro can’t tell even a little; some part of him feels like he’s known Seta forever, that he could tell Seta anything and Seta would give him all the space and silence and unconditional acceptance anyone could ask for, and he has no idea how Seta does it with just a few understated movements of his eyes and mouth. Akira’s lucky to have someone like him. This is the sort of person that Akira deserves.

“It’s always hard to leave a pet behind,” Seta says. “Is he up for adoption? Is it something we can help arrange?”

“There’s already someone who’ll be taking him off my hands.”

“That’s a relief to hear.”

“It is,” says Goro. “I know I came to thank you for helping my cat recover, but in truth, I think it was my own behavior and mistreatment that caused the illness. At this point, the best thing I can do to take responsibility is to give him to someone better.”

“I’m sure that’s not the case,” says Seta.

“It is. I don’t think it helps anyone not to acknowledge that I wasn’t ever very good at it. And that maybe I’m just not suited for it,” Goro adds thoughtfully. “I think certain people are meant to be alone, don’t you think?”

Seta doesn’t hide his expressions half as well as Akira. Watching Seta’s face just then is like watching someone try to assemble a jigsaw puzzle with only half the pieces. “It sounds depressing, but I think acceptance is really the path to peace of mind,” says Goro.

“If that’s your decision,” says Seta at last.

“It is.” Goro bows his head, just slightly, not too low. “Thank you again.”

*

Two out of four. He’s halfway there, and it can’t come soon enough. He lies awake that night shuddering as the flowers scratch their nails along his back.

*

Goro goes through the rest of the night in a daze. He spends his hours looking forward to nothing else but reading Akira’s texts. The love notes between Akira and his new boyfriend as Akira slowly forgets about him. The vitriol about Goro’s flaws. He stares out the dark window like he’s waiting for a husband to come home, dreaming about Akira’s texts, hatred in modern poetry, while Akira hunches over his phone at the kitchen table and says nothing.

“Are you here more often because you’re working from home?” Akira asks suddenly.

“Obviously,” says Goro, without bothering to look at him, and gets up to go to the bedroom. He sets his alarm for three in the morning, tucks it under the pillow, and goes to sleep early without saying goodnight.

*

 **Akira** : Something is wrong  
**SS** : ??  
**SS** : Anything in particular that makes you say that?  
**Akira** : No  
**Akira** : It’s just a feeling  
**SS** : You might be overthinking it?  
**Akira** : Maybe

*

One morning, without thinking, Goro reaches over to the knife block in the middle of making his breakfast and grabs the longest one he can find—the bread knife, with the serrated edges like his old sword—and marches to the bathroom, because the tattoo is crawling along his back like the scar tissue is alive, a rotting wound growing and growing from the inside out. He’d read a story once about a man whose leg had been injured in a war, and it’d grown infected and swollen and they’d had to cut it off in the end, to just above the knee. But the rot came back, and it wasn’t just the muscle that was infected, but the very bones; a wet, damp sort of smell, of something alive in the marrow. So they took off another few inches, to the lower thigh. And he was fine for a bit, only for the smell to come back; and they took another few inches to the middle thigh, and the smell came back; round segments of leg meat with the bone still in coming off piece by piece, while the man waited for the infection to reach the marrow of his pelvis, his spine, his vital organs, and for the doctors to realize that he was already dead.

He’s got the knife in his hand and the flower in his sights in the mirror. What kind of stupid motherfucker gets a tattoo based off their significant other without even getting a wedding? What kind of _stupid fucking idiot_ imprints someone else’s idea on their _skin_? Since when did he let Akira tell him what to do? Akira’s _glad he survived?_ Fuck him. Fuck Seta. Fuck this whole sorry excuse of a relationship; fuck this entire attempt at thinking he could be someone who could even _be_ in a relationship; fuck this flower; fuck Akira’s feelings, fuck—

“Goro?” Akira says quietly.

It’s too early in the morning. Akira’s never been an early riser. He shouldn’t have been awake—Goro can feel the flower on his back, still. The knife in his fingers presses painfully against his bones, his knuckles hard on the bathroom sink. Goro doesn’t dare look at his own face in the mirror, eyes fixed on his chest, as if he can see the tattoo from the front through his body.

Akira’s footsteps come closer. “Goro?” he says again. “Is the toast in the toaster for you?”

Goro straightens up from the sink. “You can have it,” he calls around the door, and waits until Akira passes, like he’s back in Mementos waiting for the strongest shadows to leave, to return to the kitchen and replace the knife to the knife block.

He has to be patient.

*

 **Akira** : He’d fall apart without me  
**Akira** : I can’t  
**SS** : You realize that makes it sound like he’s holding you hostage, right?  
**SS** : If you can’t stand him anymore, but you feel like you can’t leave without repercussions…  
**Akira** : He’s not holding me hostage  
**Akira** : If anything I’m the one holding him hostage  
**Akira** : He’d die if I dumped him  
**SS** : That’s not your business.  
**SS** : Do you even love him anymore?  
**Akira** : Does that matter?

This one, Goro screenshots and sends to himself, then deletes the original. He reads it over and over, like the most precious poem he’s ever read. _You can’t stand him anymore. That’s not your business. Do you even love him anymore?_ Every word, after all these years, a balm on some hunger inside him he didn’t know he had.

*

There’s a certain formality to buying a physical object that Goro thinks Akira deserves. Every song on earth is on Youtube or available for stream, but having something concrete to hold in your hands—Goro thinks the physicality of it is irreplaceable. He purchases a set of old jazz vinyl records, including one that’s entirely a series of covers of _La Vie En Rose_ , and this is what Akira finds him poring over, sitting in the middle of the living room, barefoot and hair damp from a shower. He is surrounded by vinyl record sleeves and the parts of Akira’s old record players as _La Vie En Rose_ plays on repeat, trying to figure out, from an instruction manual, how someone is supposed to dance to the song.

Once, Akira had joked that _La Vie En Rose_ would be the song they danced to at their wedding. He’d mostly said it to be an asshole, because Goro had just gotten through with saying how he hated the overuse of _La Vie En Rose_ at weddings. _A vapid set of lyrics_ , he’d said. _The only thing that’s worth listening to is the voice of the singer. The words themselves are sweet nothings._ And Akira had said, _Well, isn’t that kind of what being in love is like?_ Goro had given him a flat look, but it only made Akira’s smile grow fonder. _No matter what the other person does—they could literally be sitting around on a couch or staring out a window—and it’d be the most wonderful thing. Of course it’s a bunch of nothing._

 _Right_ , Goro had said. _Because daily life tends to be a bunch of nothing._

 _Which is why it’s so wonderful to be in love_ , Akira had replied.

“What’s going on?” Akira asks. For the first time, Goro hears clearly how he’s asking about more than just what’s going on right this second.

“You had all these record players lying around from your last hobby phase. We might as well use them, don’t you think?”

“I could throw them away if you don’t like them,” says Akira.

Maybe under any other time and place, yes, Goro buying Akira a bunch of vinyl records two years after Akira fell out of love with his music collecting phase would have been a passive-aggressive request for Akira to either use the record players or throw them out. Maybe Akira knows Goro better than Goro knows himself, and that’s exactly what this is, even though Goro thought he was being entirely earnest when he bought the records. “Don’t jump to conclusions. I only saw these and thought of you.”

Akira stills. “You bought these… for me?”

Akira himself was the one who used to bring Goro flowers. Beautiful ones, in full bloom, that made Goro feel like Akira didn’t really know him at all, and instead Goro looked enviously at the other ones that Akira brought home: the wiry ones, the stringy ones, the ones that stayed alive despite overwatering or underwatering or just bent, misshapen, haphazardly wrong. Akira tended to bring those home from work because the flower shop would just throw them away if he didn’t, and every time Akira gave him a beautiful bouquet as if Goro was in _any_ way like a perfectly-symmetrical rose, he’d vaguely wish that Akira would give him something ugly and withering that Akira wanted to keep around anyway. Not, of course, that Goro wouldn’t have killed Akira on the spot if he’d given him ugly flowers, but a man can dream.

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” says Goro again, turning back, a little shyly, to his dance instructions. “It was me who bought the records, after all.”

“What are you doing, anyway?”

“Trying to figure out if people can actually dance to _La Vie En Rose_. It’s a nice song to dance to in theory, but in practice, it seems mostly terrible.”

“Are you gonna try it?”

The record player hits the end of the track, then starts up the same song. “I already told you that the dance instructions don’t work.”

“You haven’t even tried it.”

“Look at them,” says Goro, turning his computer around so Akira can see the screen. “Everything ranges between outrageously complex for the average layperson to insultingly simple. Nothing works. It’d be boring to try either way, frankly.”

“Are you saying that you can’t do it?” Akira asks, amused.

“ _No_. I’m sure that I could master either rendition if I wanted to. The key is that I don’t.”

“That sounds like quitter talk.”

Goro narrows his eyes. “Skepticism and realism isn’t _quitter_ talk.”

“Oh yeah? I think you’re just unfairly biased against a perfectly good love song.”

“ _I_ think you’re unfairly biased towards romance, considering your—your literal job as a florist and idealistic principles of societal reform.”

“That’s really such a stereotype against florists,” says Akira mildly, and puts down his work bag and holds a hand out. “C’mon. I bet it’s not nearly as bad as you think it is.”

Goro does not take his hand and instead chooses to stand up on his own, but then feels supremely silly about having refused since, unfortunately, in order to dance with someone you often spend time holding one of your partner’s hands, and Akira just holds out his palm until Goro puts his hand reluctantly in his. One hand goes around Goro’s waist. Goro puts his palm on Akira’s chest, not without great hesitation, feeling like he’s touching something he shouldn’t be, even though it’s the same chest and the same skin and the same man Goro’s been touching for the last decade.

“The instructions said to keep a three beat tempo, meaning that everything should revolve in triangles.”

“That sounds too complicated,” says Akira.

“That’s literally the simplest possible version of the instructions.”

“Okay, but what if we just kinda messed around and saw what happened?”

Gently, even though Akira is technically in the woman’s position, Akira pushes Goro into motion. Goro stumbles immediately and glares at him in a flash of fury he can’t contain in time. Akira smiles darkly.

“Now you’re the one quitting on figuring out the instructions,” says Goro, eyes narrowed.

“Oh, nah. I was always going to make it up.”

“You’re the one who called me a quitter.”

“This isn’t quitting. It’s reinventing the rules.”

Typical Akira. Despite himself, Goro barks a laugh. Akira gives him a very small, real smile. “We’re off-beat,” says Goro, but Akira only shrugs, pushes at Goro until Goro turns them around and nearly crashes them into the coffee table.

“Whoops,” says Akira, like he couldn’t care less. Right, because Akira doesn’t love him, and really only gives a damn about Seta anymore. Goro steps on his foot until Akira yelps and knees him in the shin. “Don’t be an asshole.”

“You’re not even trying to dance properly.”

“Maybe I would if you figured out how to dance.”

Goro’s fingers squeeze hard around Akira’s. Now he pulls Akira forcefully into the three-point steps, really having no idea what he’s doing since he’s only ever seen the idea explained on a downloaded PDF, but by god, he’s going to do it with force. Akira drags him back, until they’re moving slowly across the room, Goro pulling away with all his strength into the steps he thinks are right and Akira pulling back, restraining them both until their tempo nearly matches the low lull of the song.

“Wow,” says Akira, “looks like you can dance to _La Vie En Rose_ after all.”

“You’re insufferable,” Goro groans.

“You love me,” Akira replies cheekily.

Goro stops. He doesn’t realize he’s stopped, even, until he sees the look of surprise on Akira’s face, only a few inches from his own. Akira’s hand is still suspended in the air in Goro’s palm. _I guess I do_ , Goro wants to say. _I guess you know me better than I know myself. I guess I do, but so what? Doesn’t that just mean I should love you enough to want you to love someone else?_

“Do you actually like jazz?” Akira asks suddenly.

Goro stares at him. “Yes?” They’ve been together all these years and Akira doesn’t know if he actually likes jazz? “Did you think that I went to the jazz club for work?”

“I don’t know. You said that you went to the jazz club because it was a special place for you, but I don’t know why. Do you actually like jazz?”

“It’s…” Goro thinks about it. He’d been eighteen, and he’d wanted to feel grown-up, but he also wanted to be in a place where the adults refused to let him drink and treated him like a snotty kid who was playing at being an adult. Yet the employees still seemed so fond of him. They’d let him have his favorite table most nights. The club owner seemed to mean it when he said Goro was welcome there. If not a place like home or even a place he felt safe, at least it was a place to rest. Maybe he doesn’t actually like jazz. Maybe it’s just something he associates with something else he wanted, and the taste of almost getting it.

“I do,” says Goro. “Did you think I was being dishonest with you?”

“You never listen to jazz. Like, in all the—all the ten years I’ve known you, I haven’t ever seen you listen to jazz outside of the jazz club once.”

“I promise you that doesn’t mean I don’t like it.”

“If you like it, then why don’t you listen to it?”

“It’s not good to wear it out. It’s more about a sense of wanting.”

“Do you _like_ that?” Akira asks.

“It’s not good for you to get everything you want. It’s the wanting something that’s important.” Goro smiles at Akira without teeth.

 _Something you want so badly that it makes you selfish_ —isn’t that what Akira said?

Maybe Akira can hear the ghost of his own words in Goro’s mouth, because his expression turns a little shadowed with thought. Goro drops Akira’s hand and steps away. Akira’s hand slides down Goro’s chest, limp. _La Vie En Rose_ winds down to a crooning halt. “The lyrics are still inane,” says Goro at last. “But I’m glad you like the song.”

“I thought you didn’t buy them for me?”

Goro has already vanished into the bedroom.

*

Three down. One to go.

Goro is coming to terms with the fact that those may be the last words that he will ever hear from Akira: _I thought you didn’t buy them for me?_ When Goro was a teenager, he’d thought that Akira was invincible, maybe, in the way a little kid thinks their parents are immortal. The bold, daring, unknowable phantom thief; decisive and strong and silent and perfect. Now his silences are like staring into murky water. The flashes of vulnerability in his eyes are mundane, if that. A human being like everyone else, confused and in over his head: _I thought you didn’t buy them for me?_

That night, when Goro opens Akira’s phone, there’s only a series of phone calls recorded to Seta’s number and nothing else. The first is two hours long, then another one for twenty minutes, and then another one for over an hour. Long spaces of silence, without explanation. Not even a single insult for Goro to keep before he goes.

*

“I feel like you’re always trying to leave,” Akira had said once.

“I don’t have a fear of commitment, if that’s what you’re saying.”

Akira gives him a dead look. “I don’t think people with a fear of commitment always know they have a fear of commitment.”

“I am one of those people who would know they had a fear of commitment if I had one. Which I don’t.”

Akira had laughed at that. Akira had been mostly naked at the time, both of them curled up around each other on a late Sunday afternoon. Obligations hadn’t necessarily been forgotten, but studiously ignored in favor of Goro’s hand along the small of Akira’s back, Akira’s eyes half-lidded and staring vaguely at Goro’s bare throat.

It had been a February 2nd, one of the many February 2nd’s that came and went in the years after The February Second of 2017. One of those days when Akira seemed to see death all day long, and was more inclined to say _I love you_. Goro can’t remember which year, exactly, they had the conversation about Goro leaving, because all the February 2nd’s blurred together in his head of one long trial of endurance, waiting for the blow to land.

Little insults, like, _Are you sure?_ Or, _It’s not trivial_. Or, nowadays, _I love you_. Like Goro would ever be fooled by this horrible pity, even as he stays curled up in Akira’s bed, in Akira’s apartment, having lost the strength to leave this happy unreality the way that he should have long ago.

“Hey, Goro?” Akira had said, on that February 2nd all those years after, and Goro had closed his eyes, waiting for the blow to land. He’d tried to think about a better time. About Akira’s eyes behind the Joker mask in the dark, as if he’d grown out of Mementos itself, one blood-red hand on his dagger. His monstrous soul towering over Goro, ready to land the final blow. The promise that if Goro asked, Joker wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t adhere to such normal-person cowardice, and really would keep going until one of them was dead. “Goro?” Akira had said that day in their apartment, and Goro had tried not to flinch as this empty shell of the rival Goro once dreamed of as his murderer instead pressed his lips to Goro’s throat, not to bite but to kiss. The soft touch of Akira’s lips might as well be pure acid on his skin. “I love you.”

 _If this is what it feels like to be loved_ , Goro had thought, _then why does it hurt?_

*

He’s leaving now, though.

Maybe ten years too late. But he’s leaving.

The second Akira leaves for work, Goro goes through the motions like he’s done it a thousand times before. He pulls his work suitcase from underneath the bed. He sweeps clothes wholesale into the open suitcase like a cliché of a woman who’d just found out she’s been cheated on. He doesn’t bother to pick out which ones are his and which ones are Akira’s; they’re the same size and share clothes frequently and he’ll just throw away whatever his brain tells him later is too much of Akira and not enough of himself; and then he dumps them all out because they’re all Akira’s, aren’t they, and there’s no way that Goro could look at a single one of the shirts he’s worn while living here without thinking about him. He packs a different set of shirts and tries not to think about it.

He leaves the kitchen a disaster zone of plates he scavenged and a few plates he broke in the process and a few more plates he broke for fun. He knocks over flower pots as he wheels the luggage into the main hallway, and shoves the records and record player into a corner, where the records fall one after another like dominos.

Then he shoves his own phone into the garbage disposal and runs it until metal and plastic fly.

What does Goro care now? Akira isn’t going to find him where he’s going. This is the final nail in the arrangements he’d so meticulously planned. The worse this apartment looks, the better.

And the final touches:

He pulls out the jug of lye from the closet.

He could get the tattoo on his back removed professionally, but it seems wrong. It’s a tattoo he got because he loved Akira. It should be removed the same way. Slowly, dragging it heavily with one hand after him as he pulls it out of their closet, he figured that he could just go to the bathroom and dump the lye over his back and get rid of the tattoo that way, and leave the leftover chemicals to soak through the bathtub and destroy the place. And he’ll keep the chemical burn scar as a reminder to himself: This time, for sure, he’ll learn his lesson. He won’t do a single thing for anyone else: Not kill, not die, not live. If others hate him so much, he’ll die on his own terms, without compromise to anyone at all, alone.

But now he’s standing in the bedroom he shares with Akira. That’s Akira’s favorite comforter on the mattress. Akira’s favorite pillow, flattened from how much he squeezes it at night. The bedframe that Akira had liked so much that Goro had swallowed his criticisms down and let him buy it.

Fuck it, he thinks.

He pours the lye across the mattress in an arc. The scent of burning hits his nose instantly. He soaks the entire thing, covering as much of the surface area as he can, until the mattress sizzles with decomposition and chemical breakdown.

 _Akira told me he loved me in this bed_ , he thinks.

_Akira told me he wanted me to live in this bed._

_Akira told me he wanted me to stay with him forever in this bed_.

The mattress seems almost alive, writhing with the chemicals burning through the fabric.

Goro pulls off his shirt and sinks into the mattress, pressing the entirety of his bare back to the lye. The first thing he thinks, before the smell of burning skin hits his nose, is that the bed is still warm.

*

Akira comes home fifteen minutes later because he forgot his lunch to the smell of decomposing skin. When Akira peels him up off the mattress, Goro’s skin comes away like melted wax. The camellia lies in a disfigured heap of red skin. Flesh streams between Akira’s fingers to pool along the sheets.

*

Goro doesn’t die.

It’s Akira’s fault again.

*

He’s released from the hospital only twenty days later. It is a long twenty days. Akira, who also had to be treated for the burns on his hands from getting Goro up off the mattress, handles both of their paperwork with the front desk, but he doesn’t dare enter Goro’s room. And there’s nobody else who wants to visit him besides doctors with questions about what happened and whether it was on purpose, and they're easily lied to, in the end. So he just sits there and waits to be let out, so he can go back to Akira’s apartment and return to a different kind of prison. He spends a lot of time touching the back of his head, where his hair had been burned away by the lye. He gets his hair cut short for the first time in his life, and feels nothing about the fact that his new crew cut reveals the bleached white patterns across the back of his head, to match the chemical scars along his back.

Akira doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even ask for an explanation. He doesn’t seem mad, even. Like he’d always known this would happen, and he has no one to blame but himself.

*

Akira is the one who brings him home, which should make sense, since Akira is his partner, but it still feels a little bit like a last resort because nobody else would do it. With the severity of the burns, Goro has to stand stiffly and walk slowly, and Akira’s hand hovers, ironically, near the small of Goro’s wrecked back. Goro can almost smell the flowers even before the door is opened.

The smell is still cloying and thick, like a physical wall of sugar, trying to drown out the aftertaste of vase chemicals and half-melted meat. Goro feels a bit like he wants to throw up but can’t quite make himself.

Inside, the apartment is trashed, but not how Goro remembers it. There’s still a ton of tarp along the floor for what looks like a construction project. When Akira opens the bedroom door and leads Goro to shuffle inside, there’s bright white spots where the lye ate away at the wood flooring and varnish. “Someone’s fixing that,” says Akira. His voice is tight. “I made some phone calls. The landlord doesn’t know. Probably won’t ever if Hajime pulls through.”

Another one of Akira’s friends from his blooming social circle. Goro doesn’t bother with responding.

“The mattress was replaced, by the way,” Akira says. Goro can barely tell the difference; it’s covered with one of the spare sheets. “Come on. You have to lie down.”

Goro doesn’t move.

“Goro,” Akira says. Again, like he expected this; again, like he’s resigned to Goro acting unreasonable and hardheaded. “The doctors only let you out on the condition that I make you sleep.”

Goro doesn’t respond. Instead he stares at the flower pots lining the walls and crowding the windows. They look dry. Underwatered. Goro hasn’t known Akira to neglect his plants in all the time he’s ever known him.

“Please,” says Akira. The tiredly patient voice of someone putting up with chores he doesn’t want to do.

“I’m breaking up with you,” says Goro.

“ _What_?” Akira says.

“I can’t believe that I believed you,” Goro says. “About the bullet scar being beautiful because it meant I was alive. Like that was a good thing in the first place.”

“Okay, what—sorry, literally what the fuck are you talking about? No, I’m serious,” Akira interrupts, when Goro opens his mouth. “Do you understand? Do you get it? I sat in the hospital thinking you were going to _die_ , thinking that I—that I’ll have to beg the doctors to put you on s-suicide watch, and then I still c-covered for you anyway when you said it was an _accident_ , a-and—”

Horrifically, Akira’s voice starts to crack even though his face remains perfectly the same, his every muscle fighting to keep himself under control. “—and you expect to j-just—walk in here, and—and, what, expect to shove your things in a duffel and _go_? With a dozen chemical burns down your entire body? Without an explanation, without—”

“I know about Seta,” says Goro.

Akira goes silent. Then it’s just the two of them, Goro staring at Akira from the corner of his eye, Akira as still as a frozen recording, in the middle of their trashed bedroom.

“I know you hate me,” Goro says.

“No—no, Souji was just—but that doesn’t mean I hate you, that’s not true—”

“ _Don’t_ lie to me,” Goro says.

“I’m not lying to you,” Akira says, sounding, of all things, _angry_. “Why do you always assume I’m lying about this? If you just listened to me for—”

“Shut up,” Goro replies.

“ _You’re_ trying to tell _me_ to shut up after what you just—"

“I don’t want anything to do with you,” Goro interrupts loudly. “I don’t want to hear anything from anyone who’d cheat. You fucked someone else for nine months and you think I give a shit about what you have to say?”

Akira shuts up.

Goro looks across the room, stilted like an old man with how stiff and painful his back injuries are. Akira didn’t even unpack the suitcase that Goro had put together twenty days ago. He shuffles across the room and picks it up.

“You’re really leaving,” says Akira.

Goro hadn’t been planning on having this conversation with Akira. He’d planned on burning the skin off his back and leaving the molten flesh there for Akira to find in the middle of his bed, along with the rest of his fucked up apartment; Goro has always believed that actions speak louder than words. But if they’re going to have this talk, Goro’s going to make it clear that it’s on his terms, and it’ll end the way Goro says it will, and it’ll end when he says it will and not a second sooner or later.

“I already said that, Kurusu. I don’t know what you expected. _Don’t_ tell me you’re sorry,” Goro says. “Because I know you’re not. I saw your texts.”

Akira looks like he’s going to cry. Which is funny, honestly, considering it wasn’t him who was cheated on. “Don’t you dare,” Goro warns, and Akira bites his lip.

“Where are you going?”

“Off a fucking bridge, probably.” Or Aokigahara, if he’s feeling it.

Akira freezes. “Are you really…"

“None of your business.”

“Your injuries—”

“ _None_ of your fucking business. What did you think was going to happen when I found out about him?”

And Akira looks down and away. Not going to say anything, just sit there and fester in his doubt like he had ten years ago on the first February 2nd.

“Did you think I was going to be okay with being your pity fuck? A charity project?” Goro says viciously, just to see Akira flinch. “Did you think I’d be alright with you giving your heart to someone else while I was kept as second best? While you wasted my fucking time? While you lied to my face with horseshit like _I love you_ when you, and I quote, _can’t fucking stand me_?”

“How many of those texts did you read?” Akira says, in the low tone of voice he uses when he’s pissed.

“You don’t have any right to ask me that question.”

“It was my phone, those were my texts, and if you don’t think it’s a shit thing to do to invade my privacy—"

Goro bursts into a short peal of laughter. “Privacy? You don’t even have the right to speak to me considering what you’ve done.” And then before Goro can think twice, he demands: “Do you love him?”

Akira doesn’t respond.

“Tell me the truth,” Goro says, by which he means _Tell me yes_.

Akira still doesn’t respond.

“You do,” says Goro. Satisfied, even if Akira didn’t say it with his own words. Akira just looks like he wants to die, and for a second, Goro feels bitterly, viciously glad that he does, and he sincerely hopes that Akira feels like fucking garbage for the rest of his life, because Goro is the sort of person to wish something like that.

“Well. I hope you enjoy him when I’m gone,” says Goro savagely. “I hope he actually listens to you. I hope that you can introduce him to your friends, without bad blood. I hope—“

Goro’s throat seizes and starts to burn. He isn’t going to cry.

“—I hope he asks you about your day because he cares,” he goes on tightly, “and not because he just—thinks you’re interesting, like you’re a specimen pinned to a corkboard. I hope he makes you laugh.”

“Goro,” Akira begins quietly.

Goro’s fists are shaking with the effort of keeping his eyes wide, because if he blinks the tears will start to fall. He didn’t come all this way just to _cry in the middle of leaving Akira_. “And I hope you’re never afraid of him. I hope you talk to him about more than whatever stupid shit is in his head in the middle of the night and never anything fun or happy.”

“I know you don’t want to listen to me, but—"

“I hope he makes you happy. I _know_ you’ll be happier with him. _Fuck_ ,” Goro says with emphasis, and swipes angrily at the first couple of tears down his face. “Don’t say a fucking word.”

Akira does not say a fucking word, which is a relief, for once.

“And I’ll kill you if you dare to miss me. You’re the only person I’ve ever respected and I won’t get in the way of you and Seta and I will destroy you if you regret what you’ve done now, of all times. Do you hear me?”

“I did everything wrong, I get it, and I’m sorry—”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Goro hisses. “Don’t you understand? It’s _me_ who refuses to be okay when _Seta_ is obviously the better person for you! You think I can hold a candle to someone like that? You think someone like me could actually make you happy?!”

“Please just don’t go,” Akira says.

Goro snaps. “Wake up!” Goro shouts. “Use your _fucking_ head, Kurusu! You’re miserable! What part about you being unhappy with me don’t you understand? You hate me!”

“I know, I know, but—”

“ _But nothing_! I’m not having this conversation with you.” Goro snatches the suitcase handle and storms past Akira as best as he can with his injuries, only for Akira to grab his hand.

Goro wrenches it out of his grip instantly and stalks past him. “ _Let me go, Kurusu_ ,” he says even though he’s already free, which is all he gets out before Akira grabs him from behind and hugs him close.

Goro almost screams. The fabric of his shirt rubs raw against the burns. The more he struggles, the more Akira holds him tight, until fat tears are falling freely from Goro’s sweaty face. “Let go!”

“No! You’re the one who said you were going to walk off a bridge—!”

“What do you care?!”

Akira just squeezes tighter. Goro clenches his teeth hard, trying not to cry at the pain across his back. No matter how he struggles, the scars along his back hurt too badly and he can’t quite swallow it down. “You deserve someone who isn’t me!”

“I don’t want to give up,” Akira says, like it’s that simple.

“You think I give a shit about what you want?! Let me—“ Goro’s head is woozy with pain, now, and his vision swims from both painkillers and pain alike. He’s too weak for this. Even if he wasn’t, he isn’t sure he could hit Akira anymore. “—Let me go, Akira, I swear to fucking god—”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Goro shrieks through his clenched teeth in frustration. “What’s _wrong_ with you?!”

“I love you.”

“You hate me!”

“Yeah,” Akira says against Goro’s back. “I can’t fucking stand you. I love you anyway.”

Goro’s sight goes blurry again. He can taste blood in his own mouth from his clenched teeth.

“You don’t mean that.”

“I mean it. I’m sorry. I hate you. I think you’re the worst.” Akira’s forehead rests gently against the mottled back of Goro’s head. “I love you. Please don’t cry.”

There’s a tiny clicking noise in Goro’s ears as Goro’s throat works to swallow any noise, but of course Akira can feel it in his chest. “It hurts,” Goro says. He means it as an excuse that he’s crying because of the chemical burns, but the second he says it he’s not sure what he means.

“I’m sorry,” Akira says again. Maybe he means about hugging him even with all the burns across his back; maybe he means something else.

When he finally lets Goro go, Goro just stands there, the suitcase still in one hand, and glares bitterly at Akira as Akira wipes Goro’s face. His back still spasms from the pain, until Akira makes him let go of the suitcase and sit along the floor with him. Akira’s hands hold Goro’s tightly. His palms are warm and sticky from tears. Akira’s hands are mottled with bleach-white and wrinkled where the lye has ruined his skin. That’s where they sit, dead center in the middle of their ruined bedroom, their legs tangled together and faces turned to each other, the very hands Akira used to pull Goro up off the bed to the hospital ruined to match Goro’s back wounds.

Akira strokes along the side of Goro’s face, like he used to before Goro dissolved half his hair with fucking lye and Akira could still tuck it behind his ears. Slowly, Goro makes himself breathe.

“Seta is right,” he says at last, quietly. “I just make you miserable.”

“I know.”

“I—” Goro swallows hard. In his head, he thinks, he still intends to leave. If this is really the last conversation he’s ever going to have with Akira, then Akira is owed the truth. “I love you,” says Goro quietly.

“I know,” says Akira, and jolts. “That was a little bit of an asshole thing to say. I love you t—”

“Don’t,” says Goro. “I’m telling you that because I want you to be happy.”

Akira doesn’t respond.

“Just because I love you doesn’t mean I’m a good person. I’m not a person who makes people happy. Do you understand that?”

“Yeah,” says Akira. “Actually.”

“I’m not the person for you.”

“But I love you.”

Goro’s heart flips, just like it used to the first hundred times Akira told him he loves him. “Shut up. Don’t say that.”

“I’m telling you the truth.”

“You cheated on me for nine months and you want me to believe it’s the truth? You think you would have done that if you weren’t miserable? If I weren’t the rotten piece of shit that I am?”

Akira shakes his head.

“ _Listen_ to me,” Goro says forcefully, but Akira has his eyes closed now. “Please. Akira. God. Break up with me.”

“No.”

“I’m leaving.”

“You’re not.”

“It’s for the best,” says Goro, as Akira’s eyes open, as his burnt palms come to cup Goro’s face. “Stop,” Goro warns, as he feels himself leaning in, tilting his head just so, in the way they’ve practiced a thousand times before. Akira isn’t even looking at him, just watching his mouth. “Akira,” Goro says weakly. “I want you to do what makes you happy.”

Akira doesn’t answer, which is how Goro knows that Akira isn’t listening, maybe doesn’t even care that Goro wants him to leave. The idiot. The stubborn fool, who Goro still doesn’t understand even now. Instead, Akira cradles Goro’s face like he’s something precious, kisses him square on the lips like Goro is the center of his world, just like their very first kiss all those years ago, when Goro first realized how much he wanted to be loved.

Despite everything, Goro finds himself kissing back.

*

 **Akira** : Hey  
**SS** : Akira~  
**SS** : Is Akechi-sama out of the hospital today?  
**SS** : How’s things?  
**Akira** : I think… I need some time for myself  
**Akira** : To figure things out with Goro  
**SS** : Oh  
**Akira** : Uh  
**Akira** : Some things happened  
**Akira** : Goro was going to leave but he isn’t anymore  
**SS** : Akechi was going to leave? Why?  
**Akira** : All that matters is that he isn’t anymore  
**SS** : If he was going to leave, that would have been a good opportunity for us, don’t you think…?  
**Akira** : He isn’t leaving anymore  
**Akira** : I’m not breaking up with you  
**SS** : Oh  
**Akira** : I just… need to think about things  
**Akira** : …Souji?  
**Akira** : Are you still there?  
**SS** : Right. Yes.  
**SS** : Of course.  
**SS** : Please make decisions that will make you happy.  
**Akira** : Thanks for being understanding  
**SS** : Your happiness is my own selfish wish, too.  
**Akira** : I still love you  
**SS** : I love you too.  
**Akira** : I’ll text you later  
**SS** : I’ll wait to hear from you again.  
**SS** : Please do what makes you happy.

*****

Quietly, Akira closes his phone. He slides into bed besides Goro and pulls the covers up over the two of them, so that they lie side by side, their faces turned towards each other, inches apart. They do not re-emerge for a long time.

**Author's Note:**

> this fic is part of a minibang, and i'm so honored to be partnered with [blazhy](https://blazhydoodles.tumblr.com/)! check out their art for the fic [here](https://blazhydoodles.tumblr.com/post/628362485388427264)!
> 
> the story about the man whose rotting leg gets cut off in segments over time is No-No Boy, by John Okada. not really a book goro would read, realistically, but that particular sub-story within the book seemed like something he’d like.
> 
> anyway. [thanks for reading!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6zUXhYemi4)
> 
> twitter [@p5crimes](https://twitter.com/p5crimes)  
> tumblr [@akechicrimes](http://akechicrimes.tumblr.com)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [the fall](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27585796) by [arukana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arukana/pseuds/arukana)




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